Gestapo-like ADL raid on Roy Spencer

February 28, 2014

(THE REFERENCE FRAME) – The Anti-Defamation League (originally ADL B’nai B’rith) was founded 100.5 years ago as an international NGO attempting to protect the Jews against libels and anti-Semitic memes and mass hysteria. Sometimes it was successful, sometimes it wasn’t.

by Professor Luboš Motl Pilsen

Most of the time, its acts reflected the best values of the humanity; sometimes the other defenders of the best values of the humanity found ADL’s decisions controversial or self-serving, to put it mildly.

But as far as I know, the ADL hasn’t ever joined the climate debate. Let me be somewhat more specific about this claim.

They would even find it acceptable four days ago when the New York Times stabbed the climate skeptics with icicles as if they were vampires. You see that the violence has been speeding up in recent weeks. I am getting links to similarly violent comments about the climate skeptics virtually every day which is why I no longer consider this kind of attacks to be “events”. They reflect the prevailing culture and “value” system among the climate activists.

I won’t even mention the phrase “deniers” – probably originally introduced to the climate debate by Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe – meant to compare all honest climate scientists to the Holocaust deniers because this phrase has become omnipresent and some of us have proudly adopted it. But just to be sure, yes, the word was chosen in order to link us with the Holocaust apologists. You may surely add hundreds of other examples of the demonization of the climate skeptics who were compared to some forms of fascism, to some inhuman movements from the human history by the climate fearmongers.

So you would think that the ADL just isn’t interested in these stories.

Shelley Rose, a Southeast ADL official, released a statement attacking Roy Spencer as an individual. While the decade of indefensible attacks on the climate skeptics was just fine with the ADL, Spencer’s new terminology is “deeply offensive, troubling”, and abuses millions of deaths for political sloganeering. Holy crap. Have you fell from another galaxy, Ms Rose? Or are you really such a cowardly bully who remains silent when mindless rabble and mobs are harassing, threatening, and slinging mud at individuals, but you won’t lose the opportunity to harass brave and sensible individuals yourself?

Be ashamed. Just to be sure. My country has been under the Nazi oppression for something like 6 years and I won’t allow an outsider to teach me what is analogous to Nazism and what isn’t.

Let me just make a few comments on the Jewish dimension of this exchange (or, more precisely, its non-existence).

In his original text, Roy Spencer hasn’t used the words “Jew”, “Jewish”, “Israel”, “Hebrew”, “Semite”, not even once. He talked about Nazism.

Ms Rose may be obsessed with the idea that she and her ethnic group is at the center of the world, and from some viewpoints, it may be. But it’s just a fact that Nazism wasn’t all about Jews. Nazism was distorting and damaging all aspects of the human and social life. Most people during the reign of the Nazis didn’t even know about the crimes against the Jews. The Holocaust was the single most atrocious Nazis’ crime against humanity but it was extremely far from being their only crime. Even if it hadn’t killed a single Jew, Nazism would have been deeply immoral and unacceptable. To oppose my words means to be a Nazi apologist.

Unlike the ADL, many of us protect the Jews but they’re not in the permanent core of our interest. We are not obsessed by them. We usually care about hundreds of other dimensions of life in which Jews are people just like others because their ethnicity (or other people’s ethnicity) just doesn’t matter from the viewpoints we find important. The global warming fearmongers are promoting analogous values and similar plans for the reorganization of the society as the Nazis which is why Spencer’s terminology is so powerful. But when he talks about the Nazis, he doesn’t mean just some Nazi opinions about the Jews which were just a small fraction of the inhuman ideology.

I can’t omit a reference to the concept of a self-hating Jew. Some groups of Jews have often criticized other groups of Jews for standing against their own ethnoreligious group. And let me tell you something: they were right. Many Jews unfortunately often behave in a way that resembles an autoimmune disease in the human body. The Wikipedia page contains lots of interesting quotes and thoughts. For example, it quotes the Israeli writer Amos Elon who has said that “anti-Semitism didn’t gain steam before it was taken up by Jews”.

These days, many Jews participate in the attacks against Israel i.e. against “Zionism” and other things (I know something about it after a decade of life in a heavily Jewish environment) – all these criticisms are nothing else than a contemporary form of the “self-hating Jew” concept. No other nation in the world boasts a huge fraction of members who assertively oppose the existence of the only country where the nation forms a majority.

And it may be the case that even the presence of many Jews in the climate alarmist movement is largely inspired by the self-hatred because they apparently believe that the CO2 emissions are mostly caused by the Jews (who control corporations etc.), too. And yes, of course that others have already claimed that the Jews caused global warming (everything and everyone causes global warming – and global warming causes all evils in the world). In fact, a group of (Jewish) climate activists has even claimed that global warming is caused by the Hanukkah Menorah candles. I am sure that not just “full-fledged” climate skeptics but all sufficiently independently minded and common-sense people must think that this is just a joke, a parody (because the effects of this tradition are insanely blown out of proportion and this mega-exaggeration is combined with collective masochism of an incredible degree), but it’s not a parody. Just to be sure, non-Jewish climate activists often propose insane things, too.

The memes about the existence of the self-hatred are mostly right; the cited reasons for the self-hatred are not. Jews are much more likely than others to criticize their own nation. Incidentally, the Czechs may be the silver medal winners in this discipline – a possible extra reason behind the special Czech-Israeli relationships. 😉

Do I like this “special feature” of the Jewish (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Czech) nation? Yes and no. I take it as a fact of the history and of the present. Sometimes, I can even see advantages of this attitude. On the other hand, it often complicates things. If you suffer from an autoimmune disease on top of other medical problems, it will be harder to cure the real medical problems. The autoimmune diseases are diseases, too. Anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism (as far as the drivers go, they’re the same thing) perpetuated by the Jews is anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism, too.

There is a feeling that Jews have a “stronger right” to criticize their own nation in this way. Do I share this view? Not really. If they are harming the life and image of other individuals, it’s bad. It doesn’t matter that these other individuals happen to belong to the same ethnic group. Millions of Jews are happy to live in Israel and ideologically driven attacks against their basic rights, safety, and well-being are equally bad if they are led by the Arabs, by other Jews who live abroad, or by anyone else. To a large extent, I would find it nice if this specific autoimmune disease – Jewish self-hatred – were cured. (And yes, it might be really great if the Czechs ceased to be self-whipping in our characteristic way. But I wouldn’t like if the pendulum were swung to the opposite extreme of mindless nationalism.) Due to their unusual achievements and potential, Jews are surely among those who should be less self-hating than other nations (I would be less certain that this claim could be said about the Czechs). I would probably prefer a world in which Jews behave more similarly to other nations – partly because it would make the life easier for their defenders in other groups.

Are the political affairs today – like the climate debate – all about Jews? They are definitely not. But some people – perhaps people in several if not all camps (including the ADL) – are sometimes trying to obsessively suggest that everything is about Jews. It’s not. In particular, the events in Ukraine have mostly nothing to do with the Jews, either. Due to their certain stronger abilities that are statistically demonstrable, Jews play a disproportionately strong role in natural sciences, banking, trading, U.S. foreign policy, and lots of other things, but they’re in no way “the bulk of everything”.

When Roy Spencer discusses the political and ideological aspects of the climate debate, he is not thinking about Jews most of the time. It’s therefore wrong for others – Jews or non-Jews – to try to turn every aspect of the debate to a debate about Jews. This just isn’t a debate about Jews. Roy Spencer has explained the reasons why he considers the term “global warming Nazi” accurate in quite some detail and none of the reasons are linked to the specific ethnic group of Jews.

Global warming fearmongers are similar to Nazis because they aggressively defend a supreme authority that all individuals are obliged to be obedient to. They support policies that most of the freedom-loving individuals wouldn’t choose voluntarily. They don’t hesitate to sacrifice the well-being of the poor people to the altar of their ideology. They try to penetrate into all sectors of the life of the society and make everyone uniformly compatible with their ideology – Gleichschaltung – e.g. by liquidating inconvenient journals, editors, and journal articles, firing employees, and so on. Like the Nazis, they are intrinsically anti-capitalist, and so on.

None of these similarities is related to the attitude to a particular ethnic group (Jews). Whether one would find similarities in this respect is questionable and Roy Spencer hasn’t claimed anything of the sort. He hasn’t claimed that the climate fearmongers have already killed millions of people – like the Nazis. Don’t forget: Nazism (and its despicable character) isn’t all about killing, either. But even if the global warming fearmongers differ from the Nazis when it comes to Jewish matters, it doesn’t mean that the comparison of the global warming fearmongers to the Nazis is misleading. Roy Spencer hasn’t claimed that they’re an identical group. He has claimed that they are analogous – and he surely wasn’t the first man to do so (for example, our ex-president has done it many years ago).

And differences in the attitude to the Jewish matters can’t “refute” the analogy simply because the bulk of Nazism wasn’t about Jews and the bulk of the contemporary climate fascism isn’t about the Jews, either. They’re about other social questions and when it comes to these questions that matter and to the general methods used to achieve the goals, these two anti-freedom ideologies are closely analogous. It’s doubly unfortunate if the ADL with its staggeringly obvious double standards used to attack the free individuals and their basic rights converges closer to this fascist paradigm, too.

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